Friday, July 20, 2018

"The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS" Robert Spencer's New Book

"The
History of Jihad from Muhammad to Isis" by Robert Spencer

Friend,
this is what you need to do. Go to your favorite brick-and-mortar store, or
your favorite online site, and purchase a copy of Robert Spencer's, "The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to
Isis." Producing
this book was a tremendous act of courage by Spencer and Bombardier Books. The
same opponents of Western Civilization who rioted over the Danish Muhammad
cartoons, who slaughtered the team at French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo, who
murdered 37 innocent Turks at the Sivas Massacre,
and who stabbed and shot the Japanese and Italian translators, and the Norwegian
publisher, of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" – those same dark
forces want to riot and stab and bomb and slaughter over the words on these
pages. Spencer and Bombardier deserve at the very least your investment in its full
purchase price.

Jihad
is a sword over your head. You may have been lulled into thinking that your
odds are good. After all, there are seven billion people on earth. Compared to
that number, the victims of terror attacks make up a negligible fraction. That
calculation provides a false sense of security. Dr. Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of
Government at Harvard Kennedy School writes that, "on the current path,
nuclear terrorism is inevitable … we would likely see terrorists succeed in
their aspirations for an 'American Hiroshima.'"

Even
if we are lucky enough to avoid nuclear war, jihad remains as a cultural, not
merely a military, struggle. Jihad's victories are won not just on the battlefield,
but in American textbooks. Indeed, as the South Park controversy demonstrated, jihad is victorious in
deciding when Americans are allowed to laugh. Jihad is aimed even at your right
to say the word "jihad," and, accurately, to define it. "While
serving as Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism,
John Brennan declared, '…jihad is a holy struggle, a
legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one's community, and
there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering men, women and
children." Brennan's definition is BS. You deserve, you need, to know the
truth. Jihad is a weapon aimed at you – at your freedoms, your sense of beauty,
your relationships, your understanding of your own history and your
intellectual honesty. "You" includes everybody. Yes, Muslims, I am
talking to you. Jihad has been used, and is being used, as a tool for some
Muslims to decide that other Muslims are not Muslim enough. Iran characterized
the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war as a jihad. That war killed and injured hundreds of thousands
of Muslims. More recently, ISIS justified its genocide of Shia Muslims as jihad.

The
book's contents are grim, repugnant, and terrifying. I want you to finish, as
well as begin this book, so I will be so bold as to offer advice. Read quickly.
Power through. Don't pause. You won't remember the name of every killer,
torturer, rapist and thief. That's okay. Get the general idea.

Here's
the general idea. Islam emerged approximately 1,400 years ago. Its origins are
obscure and disputed. One thing is certain. Arab conquerors, exploiting
weaknesses in the aging and warring Roman and Persian Empires, burst out of the
Arabian peninsula and, with unprecedented speed, conquered territories from
Spain to India. They eventually claimed that their sacred texts, the Koran,
hadith, and example of Muhammad, informed and sanctified their warfare. Their
sacred texts told these warriors, in explicit terms, to brutalize non-Muslims.
Brutalizing methods included decapitation, dismemberment, and the placement of decapitated heads between
the corpse's feet.
These are all traditional methods of dehumanization and desecration. Sanctioned
and modeled tactics also included rape,sex slavery, torture,
totalitarian rule, crucifixion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Muslims were ordered to make war in perpetuity until everyone on earth was a Muslim.
Non-Muslims' rights were rigidly curtailed. Fighting and dying in battle was the very best thing that any Muslim could do, and it
guaranteed the warrior bliss in paradise. Every good thing in life owed its
existence to warfare. "Paradise lies under the shade of swords."

For
the past 1,400 years, continuously, without pause, in every century and, eventually,
reaching every inhabited continent, Muslims have obeyed these verses. Any given
jihad might look something like this. Invaders arrived. They identified
themselves as jihadis. They identified their victims, Muslims or not, as
infidels. The invaders massacred civilians. They erected mountains of
decapitated heads, or they used heads to terrorize their opponents, shooting
them from catapults, for example. They took sex slaves. Slaves were so
plentiful that slave prices plummeted. Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian,
Buddhist, Hindu, houses of worship were ransacked of their jewels and precious
metals. Booty was divided up lavishly among the suddenly enriched jihadis. The
wrecked remains of the house of worship were pulverized and the rubble and dust
was spread on the road leading to the mosque, so that Muslims could feel, with
their every step, their superiority over the highest aspirations of those they
humiliated.

Jews
and Christians were taxed and forced to wear a distinguishing mark on their
clothing, perhaps in the shape of a monkey or pig. They were denied the right
to repair their houses of worship, or to ring bells, or to speak of their faith
in public. Pagans, including Hindus, were simply massacred. Those who did not
massacre enough Pagans were threatened and reminded that to live by their
scripture and their prophet's example, they must kill as many as possible, as
ruthlessly as possible. Conquerors insisted on sexual access to the prettiest
princess, even if only to humiliate her, by, for example, forcing her to work
as a household servant while naked. In other cases, the most handsome boy might
be demanded for the conqueror's pleasure.

If
there was a library, no matter how ancient and revered, it was despoiled.
Legend depicts Caliph Omar justified his burning of the books, to heat
bathwater, of the library of Alexandria. "The books will either contradict
the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they
are superfluous." No one knows if Omar said this, but we do know that both
Muslims and non-Muslims believed it, which suggests that enough jihadis behaved
like this that it was plausible. Indeed, the same story is told, about the same
caliph, regarding the destruction of Persian libraries.

It is
true that Saladin's son attempted to bring down Egypt's pyramids, because they
are un-Islamic. And Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr did order the removal of the nose of
the Sphynx. The remains of the Colossus of Rhodes, that had survived hundreds
of years of Christianity, succumbed to Islamic invaders, who sold them as scrap
metal. A Muslim ordered that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, site of Jesus'
entombment, be razed to bedrock. Hagia Sophia, a millennia-old Christian
church, was desecrated and used as a mosque. Countless Hindu temples faced the
same fate.

Ctesiphon,
one of the largest cities in the world, with a mixed population of Jews, Christians,
and Zoroastrians, became a ghost town all but overnight. Muslim conquerors used
its bricks to construct their edifices. Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms in what is
now Afghanistan and Pakistan provided unimaginable booty to divinely sanctioned
plunderers. The territory, as of the 21st century, has never come
close to its former glory. Formerly wealthy Afghanistan and Pakistan are today
among the countries whose own citizens most long to escape.

This
process, or something very like this process, didn't happen once or twice. It
didn't just happen during Islam's first hundred or two hundred years. Jihads
like this happened over and over. Indeed, biographies of Muhammad describe him
as a warrior and raider of caravans who massacred and tortured captives, took
sex slaves, and ordered his men to rape captives even in front of their
still-living husbands. Across the globe, in a multitude of tongues, jihadis
cite the same Koran verses and hadith to sanctify their behavior. Tamerlane,
"The Sword of Islam," who is estimated to have killed five percent of
the world's population, cited jihad verses. As did the Barbary Pirates who
enslaved Americans, and as did Osama bin Laden.

The
cultural, as well as the biological, genocide aspect of jihad is also not of
the distant past. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini's right hand man, Ayatollah
Sadegh Khalkhali, wanted to bulldoze the tomb of Persian emperor Cyrus the
Great, the tomb of Iran's national poet, Ferdowsi, and Persepolis, the 2,500
year old royal Persian city. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan
Buddhas, the largest standing Buddha carvings in the world. In 2012 and 2013,
jihadis from the Ansar Dine destroyed ancient Muslim shrines and library manuscripts in Timbuktu,
Mali. In 2016, ISIS
took time out from the murder, torture, and sexual enslavement of human beings
to destroy culture, including two-millennia-old Roman structures at Palmyra.
Again, these Pagan structures survived hundreds of years of a Christian Middle
East. It took devout Muslims to bring them down.

Spencer's
book will dispel pernicious, politically motivated canards, including the
following: that there was a Golden Age when Islam was peaceful and tolerant and
Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Sikhs, and Hindus lived happy,
productive, free lives under its protection; that Islamic terror is a
relatively recent innovation, born, in various versions, with the state of
Israel, or with Western colonial incursion; that the primary translation of "jihad"
should be "peaceful struggle for noble, personal goals;" that the
Crusades were an offensive action, or that they started the conflict between
Islam and the West, or that their goal was forced conversion of Muslims; that
jihad can be "fixed" through actions by non-Muslims. "If only we
had a Palestinian state … If only those Hindus were not so fanatical and
nationalistic … If only American films did not depict terrorists as Muslims …
If only American school children were forced to recite the shahada … If only Americans were not so
xenophobic, white supremacist, Christian fascist … If only we keep Tommy
Robinson in solitary confinement a bit longer." None of these will ever
end jihad.

Critics
will bash this necessary book, if they pay any attention to it at all, by
insisting that Robert Spencer is an unreliable narrator. It's not Spencer's
words that inevitably paint jihad as one of the most lurid, destructive, and
grotesque forces in human history. It is Muslim chroniclers and conquerors
themselves. Spencer quotes contemporaneous, canonical sources. Muslim
chroniclers boast with pride of their string of unprecedented atrocities. "I
bring you slaughter," Muhammad said. "I have been made victorious
through terror … the treasures of the world were put in my hand," Muhammad
bragged,
distinguishing himself from previous Jewish and Christian prophets and saints
who were, in Muhammad's estimation, longwinded, but not booty-rich warlords
like him. Spencer also quotes non-Muslim eyewitnesses, and books published by the
university presses of Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Georgetown, Fairleigh
Dickinson, NYU, Crete, the Universities of Pennsylvania and California, and the
State University of New York. Indeed, Spencer does not pretend that he is
saying anything new or innovative. Rather, he is merely performing the excellent
service of providing a reader-friendly outline of 1,400 years of jihad.

Another
possible detraction. "Yes, but, if someone published a history of the
colonization of the Americas, that would make for very tough reading." No
doubt.

First,
committing atrocities is a violation of, not obedience to, Biblical mandates.
Conversion by force is almost unknown in Judaism, and there is no Old Testament
verse that commands Jews to conquer the world or to force Gentiles to become
Jews. As early as the fourth century, when, after three centuries of Pagan
Roman persecution, Christianity was beginning to gain worldly power, Saint
Augustine wrestled with the concept of "just war." Augustine asked,
and attempted to answer, when and how is it consistent with Christian belief to
take up arms.

When
Christians do take up arms wrongly, they violate the example of Christianity's
founder, Jesus Christ. Jesus did not make war; he practiced peace. Jesus did
not rape captives; he uplifted women, including the most stigmatized: the
ritually unclean woman with a hemorrhage, a woman who had been possessed, and the sinful woman taken in
adultery. Jesus did not raid caravans and steal their contents; he said
"Render unto Cesar what is Cesar's." Jesus did not torture anyone;
Jesus healed. Jesus did not practice ethnic cleansing; he and his followers
interacted respectfully with their fellow Jews, Roman Pagans, and Africans. Christian scriptures do not recommend
murder, rape, theft, or war.

Indeed,
Christianity, with lightning speed, with its emphasis on a loving God's
relationship to each human, whom he made in his image, became a support for
oppressed peoples. Our Lady of Guadalupe was one such support. She is said to
have appeared to an Aztec and to have reassured him that Christ's love and
promises extended to all people, not just conquistadors. Just so, the
Abolitionist Movement was informed by the Biblical narrative of "let my
people go."

Second,
accounts of Western Christians' misdeeds are plentiful and well-known. These
accounts first appear, invariably, at the same time as Western Christians'
misdeeds. This is the case because the Judeo-Christian tradition demands
self-examination and public confession when one has failed to live up to
Biblical ideals. Witness Psalms 32 and 51. King David engineered the death of his
rival, Uriah. David begs for forgiveness, and vows to change. God forgives
David, but David suffers horribly as the result of his crime. Witness Bartolome
de las Casas, a Dominican friar, who recorded, and acted on, crimes committed
by conquistadors.

When
Christians engage in destructive behaviors, they critique themselves or they
are critiqued by others. Indeed, in "The History of Jihad," Robert Spencer
himself is quite open about, and critical of, atrocities committed by Crusaders.
There are Western scholars whose careers were founded on, or advanced by, their
muckraking, exposing the dark side of Western Civilization. Adam Hochschild,
the white, male son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, won numerous
awards for "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in
Colonial Africa" about a previously little-discussed atrocity. Taylor
Branch, a white man from Atlanta in the American South, won a Pulitzer Prize, a
National Humanities Medal, and a MacArthur Genius Award. He wrote a massive,
three-volume biography of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Struggle.
John Cornwell, a former Catholic seminarian, won fame with his controversial
book, "Hitler's Pope." When Cornwell's many critics found
inaccuracies in his work, they did not riot or kill; they wrote and published.

Where
are the analogous practitioners of confession, redemption, and repair in the
Muslim world? Where were they a thousand years ago? Bartolome de las Casas did
not have a voice only. He also had ears willing to hear his words. Inspired by
this one friar, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull, Sublimis Dei,
insisting on the full humanity of the newly discovered
Indians. Can anyone
imagine a Muslim de las Casas having a chat with Muhammad, arguing for the full
humanity of the kuffar?

Where
are the contemporary Muslim historians exposing the brutal history of jihad? Where
are their prestigious prizes, university chairs and awards? Where are the
passionate Muslim authors dedicating their lives to robbed, enslaved, raped,
and murdered kuffars' long-since-evaporated tears? Where are the affirmative
action programs for descendants of the Muslim slave trade? Where are the
reparations for the Christians Slavs whose Muslims overlords kidnapped their daughters
for sex slave markets, their sons for slave armies? Eastern Europe, historians
say, is poorer than Western Europe to this day at least partly because Eastern
Europe had to devote so much energy to fighting off jihad. Eastern Europeans
provided a bulwark that allowed Western Europe to flourish. Where is Eastern
Europe's apology? All of these acts of contrition on the part of Muslims exist
in the same imaginary dimension where "jihad" means "befriending
Christians."

Consider
what happens even to the most circumspect of social critics in the Muslim
world. Bassem Yousef is often dubbed "the Egyptian Jon
Stewart." Youssef's audience and influence dwarfed Stewart's. Youssef's TV
program made gentle fun of anti-democratic trends in the Middle East. The
powers-that-be, with the participation of average Egyptians, destroyed him. He
lives in exile in the US. Consider Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel-Prize-winning novelist
in "modern, secular" Turkey. Pamuk merely mentioned the Armenian
genocide. Pamuk was criminally charged. His countrymen burned his books.
Consider the stabbings, hacking to death with machetes, and other murders of
proponents of secular government in contemporary Bangladesh. Consider the fate of Raif Badawi, a
Saudi man sentenced to ten years in prison and a thousand lashes because, in
his blog, he dared to say things like this, "What increases my pain is the
Islamist chauvinist arrogance which claims that innocent blood, shed by
barbarian, brutal minds under the slogan 'Allahu Akbar,' means nothing."

In
place of the self-examination and self-correction typical of Judeo-Christian
cultures, too many apologists have tried not to confront jihad, but merely to
redefine it. CAIR has money and power. It could put those resources to use
exposing and rejecting violent jihad. Instead, CAIR made a tawdry attempt to pimp "jihad" as a synonym
for "calisthenics" and "making friends with Christians." CAIR
was topped by the BBC, who dubbed their TV show "My
Jihad," "a
tender and funny love story." I'm sure viewers can't wait to see the BBC
romantic comedy, "My Holocaust."

One
must remind those relativists who wish to relative-ize away 1,400 years of
jihad, that, yes, all humans, regardless of ethnicity or religion, do
destructive things. Motivations include mental illness, fear, and greed for
resources, power, or glory. We can't eliminate greed, fear, or psychopathology,
but we can tame them with civilized advances like the Geneva Convention,
diplomacy, and forensic psychiatry. The concept of jihad adds to an already
overburdened humanity another, completely unnecessary, and diabolically
seductive reason to kill and destroy. Shahids, or those who die in jihad, are promised
the highest paradise, multiple heavenly virgins, and the opportunity to intercede
on behalf of, and be granted divine favors for, seventy relatives.

The
final nail in the relativist coffin on jihad: the chroniclers Spencer quotes were
themselves not sheltered innocents. These people had seen conflict. The Roman
and Persian Empires waged war for seven hundred years, on the same territory
jihadis first invaded. Both non-Muslim victims and Muslim chroniclers announce
that jihadis fought ruthlessly, destroyed totally, and obeyed no previous
military convention.

Thought
police censors will claim, with zero evidence, that Spencer's book is
anti-Muslim. Repeat this as many times as necessary: Muslims are themselves
victims of jihad. Muslims are killed. Muslim culture is destroyed. This
Muslim-on-Muslim death and destruction is not new. Spencer's book begins with
the bloodbath that was proto-Islam. One Arab warlord after another decided that
he had a monopoly on Islam, and decided that his neighboring tribe was deviant.
Slaughter ensued, all in the name of jihad. The killing was shockingly
intimate. Muawiyah, founder of the Umayyad dynasty, Muhammad's brother-in-law
and distant cousin, murdered Aisha, Muhammad's widow. One of the oldest copies
of the Koran is said to be stained with the blood of Uthman, the very caliph
who first called for the Koran to be compiled. His blood was shed by his fellow
Muslims.

Immediately
upon Muhammad's death, Khalid ibn Al Walid waged war on anyone in Arabia who
wasn't in line with emergent Islamic orthodoxy. He was called "the drawn
sword of Allah," "the friend of death," and his motto was,
"We love death more than you love life." Khalid betrayed and killed
his fellow Muslim Malik, put his head in a cooking pot, and raped his wife Layla
"like a donkey." "I love the battlefield more than I love my
wedding night with a beautiful woman," he said. Khalid had had many
"wives." Normal people love life more than they love death, and
normal people enjoy making love more than they enjoy killing other human
beings. Indeed, the Koran itself, in verse 2:216 says that though Islam "prescribes"
fighting" "fighting is hateful" to Muslims. A book exposing
jihad is a gift to Muslims as much as it is a gift to the rest of us.

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